West Country Research Articles

Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, xviii+323, ￡55.00

Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, xviii+323, ￡55.00

Two Film Treatments: <i>Protest</i> and <i>The Fall</i>

When developing The Fall, Peter Whitehead drew upon a range of ideas and scenarios he had previously worked with in the early sixties. While still a student at the Slade, he had experimented with writing projects concerned with protest and the act of assassination. The latter in par tic u lar became something of an abiding theme for Whitehead. A recurrent motif in work produced during this period is that of assassination as protest: a spectacular, catalyzing act. These themes are discussed in the completed version of The Fall, but Whitehead had envisaged a very different final result when preparing the treatment in early 1968. The text outlines a film that is not without formal sophistication, but appears to position itself within the genre of the thriller. There is a distinct narrative core based around the theme of assassination and specifically, the central character's decision to murder a terminally ill man as an act of protest. The text is preceded here by Protest, an additional treatment from 1967. This is not an earlier draftof The Fall document, but a separate text composed prior to Whitehead's experiences in New York. While Protest is closer in tone to the projects Whitehead worked on in the early sixties, both texts are connected on the basis of sharing this same narrative event, the act of sacrifice. They are concerned with the symbolic assassination, a traumatic act that aimed to foreground the voracious recuperating ability of the Mass Media. Protest Film Synopsis by Peter Whitehead © Copyright 1967 Lorrimer Enterprises Limited Characters 1. Stephen, the main character in the film. Nineteen years old, a student at University College London. He is studying Physics and the History and Philosophy of Science, but is increasingly disenchanted and disillusioned with his studies. He is much more interested in writing, music, painting and other activities that such a young idealist would find more rewarding. 2. The Brigadier, Stephen's father, who since the war has been working at the War Office in a department connected with the Defence, Nuclear Energy and Missile Programme. 3. The girl who becomes Stephen's girlfriend. She is eigh teen and working as a student nurse in a hospital in London. Story Treatment The film starts in the luxurious Belgravia flat of the Brigadier, who is giving a farewell party upon his retirement from the War Office. The party consists largely of grown- ups, the elegant society that the Brigadier has cultivated during his esteemed bowler hat years at the War Office. His son is alone, observing his father's friends whom he obviously somewhat despises and from whom he has always been alienated. It is learnt that the Brigadier is retiring to a large, beautiful country house somewhere in the West Country and is giving up the social life he has enjoyed for the last ten years. He laughingly jokes about his return to nature. Stephen will no longer have this and protection and moves into a bed- sitting room somewhere near his University department. The following day Stephen is in the laboratory working. He talks to some of his friends and we realise his lack of enthusiasm for his work. We see him returning to his new room already decorated with all the emblems and signs of the introverted sensibility. He is a lonely sort of person and probably does not realise just how much more vulnerable he will be living alone, even though he never thought he enjoyed living with his parents. One weekend a few weeks later Stephen is at the home of his father on their estate. His father takes him for a walk and talks patronisingly about the peace and quiet of his new life and how he welcomes the opportunity to reflect on and remember the years before he started his job in the City. Stephen obviously wants to talk about himself but finds it impossible. His sensitivity contrasts harshly with his handsome father's arrogant confidence. …

Ten‐minute chat

Farm vet Rupert Kirkwood recently completed a 821‐mile circumnavigation of the West Country coastline by kayak, paddling up every inlet, estuary, creek, ditch, gulch and drain, and going into every cave.

P247 High levels of iron in the soil are associated with an increased incidence of bovine tuberculosis in cattle

BackgroundNumbers and proportion of cases of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in cattle are increasing, largely in the west country and Wales with few if any cases in the south and north...

Prophecy and Imagination in the Romantic City

there never was any age or any country so favourable to the success of imposture and the growth of superstition, as this very age and this very England Robert Southey, Letters from England (1807), 443. One of the most extraordinary features of the lace 18th and early 19th centuries--those years of commercialisation and urbanisation, utilitarianism and political economy--was the prevalence of prophecy: Londoners of all classes--respectable Anglican clergymen, members of Parliament, veteran scientists, servant girls from the West Country, half pay navy officers, artisan engravers--proclaimed their conviction that God was about to end the world and remake it, bringing about a millennium of love and peace in which the redeemed would live with Christ on earth. The Swedenborgians attracted hundreds to their New Jerusalem Church; Richard Brothers was followed by thousands when he envisioned London's destruction and remaking in apocalyptic fire; Joanna Southcott's supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, believing she was pregnant with the returning Messiah. But while historians of religion have attributed prophets' popularity to the failings of the established church (see Hole, Oliver, Harrison), and historians of radicalism have related it to the French Revolution (see Thompson. McCalman. Mee, Worrall) there was also another cause--London itself, the new and bewildering kinds of social experience it produced, rendered some of the inhabitants desperate to imagine themselves into a better, more human way of life. (1) In this essay I want to ask what some of these prophecies had in common and what they had to do with the experience of London, the world's largest and most commercial city. I shall ask a further question too: what happened to them? The eruption of prophecy, I shall suggest, was in fact the end of something, the last great flowering of the practice of interpreting current events through the framework of Old Testament scripture. Ultimately, for most Britons such prophecy failed to encompass the new urban conditions within a convincing structure of meaning, failed, that is, adequately to understand the city. It was De Quincey, I will show, who diagnosed this failure, making himself an embodiment of the city's perversion of the capacity for redemptive vision. In the process he foresaw a decisive shift, an inaugural moment of modernity--the secularization of prophecy in the poetic imagination and the flight of that poetic imagination to the countryside. (2) De Quincey, in other words, anticipated, and suggested the cause of, a division between country and city and poetry and prose that would dominate the next two hundred years of British culture. The overwhelming nature of the new urban conditions is attested by the German visitor G. C. Lichtenberg, describing his First experience of London in the 1770s: Imagine a street about as wide as the Weender in Gottingen, bin, taking it altogether, about six times as long. On both sides tall houses with plate-glass windows. The lower floors consist of shops and seem to be made entirely of glass; many thousand candles light up silverware, engravings, books, clocks, pewter, paintings, women's Finery, modish and otherwise, gold, precious stones, steel-work, and endless coffee-rooms and lottery offices. The street looked as though it were illuminated for some festivity ... a porter runs you down, crying 'By your leave,' when you are lying on the ground. In the middle of the street roll chaises, carriages and drays in an unending stream. Above this din and the hum and clatter of thousands of tongues and feet one hears the chimes from church clocks, the bells of the postmen, the organs, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies, and tambourines of English mountebanks, and tile cries of those who sell hot and cold viands in the open street corners. Then you will see a bonfire of shavings flaring up as high as the upper floors of the houses in a circle of merrily shouting beggar-boys, sailors and rogues. …

Paul Winchester Houghton

Paul Houghton led a long, adventurous life. As a naval surgeon (surgeon lieutenant commander) in the second world war he saved the lives of two admirals and treated the badly...

Determination of the lactose and galactose content of cheese for use in the galactosaemia diet

Treatment of galactosaemia requires a low galactose diet. In the UK, traditionally, all cheeses have been excluded from the diet, although some types of mature hard cheese are likely to be low in lactose and galactose. The present study aimed to determine the lactose and galactose content of mature cheeses. Over 6 years, the UK Galactosaemia Support Group commissioned the analysis of 109 samples (by two laboratories) of 12 cheese types, in eight batches throughout the year. Cheeses, obtained from retail outlets, were homogenised, sugars were extracted using water or 40% alcohol for fatty samples, and samples were deproteinised. Enzymatic analysis using measuring light absorbance was conducted on filtered extracts. Cheeses containing undetectable quantities of lactose (<2.8 mg 100 g(-1), Leatherhead Food International, Leatherhead, UK (LFI) analysis; <10 mg 100 g(-1), Laboratory of Government Chemist, Teddington, UK (LGC Limited) analysis) and galactose were: Gruyere (five samples); Emmental (block, sliced and grated) (16 samples); Jarlsberg (six samples); Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano Italian Parmesan (block and grated) (16 samples); and mature Cheddar cheese from the UK West Country Farmhouse Cheese Makers Association (35 samples) only. Lactose containing cheeses included other mature Cheddar cheeses, Gouda and Edam. Gruyere, Emmental, Jarlsberg, Italian Parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano), and mature Cheddar cheese produced in one area of England where the manufacturing process is standardised and guaranteed are now allowed in the UK galactosaemia diet.

Patriotism, Politeness, and National Identity in the South West of England in the Late Eighteenth Century

This paper explores the ways in which a group of West Country literati portrayed their region and activities in two key publications: Poems Chiefly by Gentleman of Devonshire and Cornwall and Essays by a Society of Gentlemen at Exeter. It identifies the characteristics of the regional and national identities they create in terms of British resistance to foreign aggression, polite learning and a conservative sociability, and considers these as part of the establishment response to the French Revolution.

Running John Bull: The Provenance of a Masquerade in the Lesser Antilles

This article explores the provenance of the Bull masquerade in the Caribbean Lesser Antilles. It looks at possible exemplars in Western Europe, particularly in Britain's West Country, Ireland, and Scotland, and also in West Africa, especially in the Upper Guinea region. It concludes that the Caribbean Bull was influenced by Upper Guinea masquerades but nourished in an environment conducive to Christmas Bull perambulations on a European model.

The Demon’s Lexicon (review)

Reviewed by: The Demon’s Lexicon Kate McDowell Brennan, Sarah Rees. The Demon’s Lexicon. McElderry, 2009 [336p]. ISBN 978-1-4169 6379-0 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 7–10 Since their father died, brothers Nick and Alan have lived alone with their mentally unstable mother, formerly a magician. Now Black Arthur and the other magicians who killed the boys’ father have tracked the family down again, so they’re moving from the West Country into London. There they find new troubles when two kids from Nick’s school, Mae and her brother Jamie, come to them for protection from the demons that have marked Jamie as prey. The foursome head to the Goblin’s Market and the demon dance, where they hope that Nick’s uncanny ability to dance up demons will avert the fate that threatens Jamie—and now Alan as well. This story of teens on the run from evil forces swerves into psychological-thriller territory when Nick realizes that Alan is hiding family connections that prove that the boys aren’t really brothers, and the writing generates maximum eeriness from Nick’s cold and logical narration. Nick’s emotional emptiness first seems to be related to his learning disabilities, then to the possibility that he may be a magician, but in the end his almost inhuman detachment indicates something much more sinister about his nature. Brennan is skilled with suspense, slowly revealing that none of the characters are who they seem, and the clever plot twists effectively misdirect the reader enough times that the final revelation of Nick’s identity is breathtaking, rewriting all that came before. Give this to fantasy and horror fans alike, but don’t give away the surprise ending. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Among the dissenters: reciprocal ethnography in nineteenth-century Inglistan

AbstractThe emergence of ‘fieldwork’ as a technique for gathering knowledge was part of a reciprocal process of two-way observation between Europeans and Asians. The methods of language-learning, cultural immersion, and note-taking that were eventually canonized in the discipline of anthropology were no more unique to Europeans than the writing of the learned travelogues through which they first found expression. In the early nineteenth century, Asian travellers were observing and taking notes on the English at home as part of a reciprocal pattern of exchanges made possible by the new commercial and diplomatic contacts of the age. This thesis is demonstrated by using the Persian travel diary made by an Iranian ‘fieldworker’ to reconstruct in detail the methods and conditions of his ‘ethnographic’ tour of the English West Country in 1818. In the reversal of a familiar trope of European ethnography, the diary described meetings with the ‘sects’ and ‘mystics’ of the English provinces in the very same years that saw the first English accounts ofPersia religiosa.Using numerous contemporary English sources to build on the Persian field diary, the article reveals the multiple patterns of reciprocity by which knowledge was gained through a ‘scientific’ epistemology of observation and experience. From Unitarianism to Baha’ism, the collaborative knowledge so created led to changing intellectual attitudes among both European and Asian scholar-travellers.The well informed of all denominations are the most liberal.(W. J. Fox,A sermon on free inquiry in matters of religion, 1815)

West Country Farms: House-and-Estate Surveys, 1598-1764

As the authors of this handsome and innovative study point out in their introduction, in the past historians of vernacular architecture have been forced to let a fragment of the documentary record stand for the whole. There was no alternative to using the incomplete sample of buildings that had survived, many of them inevitably much altered over time, and almost inevitably skewed towards the more substantial and prosperous buildings of any given period. In a formula well known to the historians of vernacular architecture, the further back one goes the fewer examples of the more humble buildings survive intact. Generally speaking, it is the dwellings of the poor and the more mundane buildings that are most likely to have been swept away and replaced or substantially ‘improved’. As a means of overcoming these obstacles, this study uses house-and-estate surveys from the early modern period, which provide a much more complete and rounded record. What sets them apart from conventional manorial surveys and other documents is the detailed information they give about actual houses, outhouses, and farm buildings. As a result these surveys come closer than any other documents to providing information about all the habitations of village property-holders, regardless of their wealth. The volume brings together surveys which permit an examination of the social structure and living conditions of twenty West Country communities in the early modern period. The first part of the book discusses the twenty communities for which such surveys exist: this includes the social structure of the communities, the houses (covering construction and plans, rooms and their uses), the pattern of housing in the villages, the buildings of the farmsteads, and the relationship of the farms to the regional economies. The second part considers each of the villages and their farms in detail, discussing their individual features, the character of the houses, their farmsteads and the farming economy revealed by the surveys. Together, these surveys provide an almost unparalleled portrait of a wide sample of the small farming and maritime communities of the south-west. The remarkable feature of many of the farming communities was the relatively broad distribution of landholding which, when plotted graphically, subdivided into a number of types. One pattern was for a single broad hump of landholding, centred around an average of about thirty acres. Another shows a similar concentration at about the same level but with a low peak of holdings of an acre or so. In some villages, smallholders of this size comprised about a third of all the holdings.

‘Ancient custom time out of mind’: copyhold tenure in the west country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

AbstractCopyhold tenure for a number of lives, regulated by manorial custom, was by far the most common form of landholding throughout much of the West Country during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was only gradually replaced by leaseholds for a term of years during the eighteenth century. Manorial custom, the body of local law and traditional usage, hallowed by long use and enforced in the manorial court, governed all aspects of farming practice, transfer of holdings, entry fines, rents, heriots, rules of cultivation, access to common grazing, wood, stone, fuel and the rights of widows. This paper uses examples from Wiltshire and Dorset to show the great variety of manorial customs, the effect these had on the lives of copyhold tenants and the problems which some long-established customs could cause for landowners.

Kinship and Networking in a Quaker Family in the Nineteenth Century

Recently there has been much publicity about problems caused in society by family breakdown and the distressing lack of citizenship, particularly among young people. Older generations usually remember the past as better and regret how things have changed. There is, however, a consensus amongst social historians that the romantic view of families in the past being large, loving and supportive is a myth exploded by empirical and statistical evidence. By contrast, this study of kinship and networking in a West Country Quaker family in the nineteenth-century illustrates the family's effectiveness in creating responsible family members and good citizens. The article discusses how kinship originated, strengthened and underpinned their achievements and how its importance faded over time.

Wordsworth, Joseph Johnson, and the Salisbury Plain Poems

Previous articleNext article No AccessJoseph Johnson MLA 2008: A Selection of Papers on Joseph JohnsonWordsworth, Joseph Johnson, and the Salisbury Plain PoemsJoseph ByrneJoseph Byrne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 40, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043452 Views: 7Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

An English chronicle entry on Robin Hood

This short article introduces a previously unknown pre-Reformation chronicle entry about Robin Hood. Until now, no English chronicle entry has been discovered, and only Scottish authors are thought to have set Robin in a chronological context. The new find places Robin Hood in Edward I's reign, thus supporting the belief that his legend is of thirteenth-century origin. It contains a uniquely negative assessment of the outlaw, and provides rare evidence for monastic attitudes towards him (topical, in light of the outlaw's anti-monastic behaviour). By mentioning Sherwood it buttresses the evidence for a medieval connection between Robin and the Nottinghamshire forest with which he has become so closely associated. It also constitutes more evidence for the strength of West Country Robin Hood traditions in the late middle ages.

Noel Francis Harley

Born in Sidcup, Kent, but raised mostly in Barnsley, Noel Francis Harley eventually settled in the West Country after training posts in Exeter, Bristol, Birmingham, and Sweden. Only the second...

‘Sometimes no amount of reflection or theory helps’ – thoughts on the ‘quality’ of Literacy provision across a range of Black Country providers

This article originates from the collaborative efforts of a group of teachers working in a range of PCE establishments across the West Midlands and Black Country, and in the ‘field’ of Literacy education. Drawing on the reflective journals kept by in‐service students as part of an Integrated Certificate in Education course, the project sought to provide an overview of the Literacy provision they were involved in. The aim was to identify whether distinctions exist between the Literacy education offered by different providers (in this case FE colleges as opposed to training providers) and if so to begin to account for these. A key finding was that there are important factors that impact on the quality of the provision offered by some training providers. Following this analysis, participants aimed to produce a set of questions that practitioners can ask of the provision they are involved in order to identify whether it facilitates effective Literacy education to best address students’ interests.

George Goring (1608–1657): Caroline Courtier and Royalist General (review)

Reviewed by: George Goring (1608–1657): Caroline Courtier and Royalist General Mark Charles Fissel George Goring (1608–1657): Caroline Courtier and Royalist General. By Florene S. Memegalos. Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7546-5299-1. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 392. $99.95. Florene Memegalos’s biography of Colonel George Goring is old-fashioned English military history at its most enjoyable. Employing the traditional narrative, she recites Goring’s adventures, particularly those during the reign of Charles I. The colonel fought on the Continent in the 1630s, in the English civil wars in the 1640s, and concluded a fairly distinguished career as a commissioned officer in the Spanish Army of Flanders in the 1650s. Although the events she recounts are familiar, Memegalos unearths new details (p. 225) in her treatment of a complicated and controversial warrior. Goring’s military reputation has been besmirched by allegations of debauchery and unprincipled behavior. Yet, his consistent [End Page 1277] employment, not to mention the trust placed in him by his king, queen, comrades, and several foreign governments, substantiates his dependability and talent. The author perused manuscripts in county record offices, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and overseas archives. The main repository for evidence concerning English military history is the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), now located in the London suburb of Kew. Whilst the author’s investigation of auxiliary archives is superlative, she chose not to explore the National Archives, relying instead on the dated, incomplete, and occasionally inaccurate Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. A goodly amount of uncalendared material bearing directly on English warfare survives in the Exchequer class of documents (E 101, E 351, E 407, etc.), the War Office (WO 49, WO 50, etc.), and the Privy Council Registers (PC 2, available in printed facsimile in many cases). The veritable gold mine for the English civil war, however, is State Papers 28, comprised of scores of boxes of military documentation that lacks a published calendar. Goring’s name (and likely his signature) would doubtless turn up in these darker corners of the National Archives, and Memegalos possesses the skill to have a good trawl through this material. The colonel’s biography might have been described as definitive if she had perhaps another year or so to cull through these intriguing classifications. This book illuminates the royalist, rather than the parliamentary, officer corps. In the last decade a relatively complex historiography of the cavaliers has developed, and Goring’s royalism is a promising line of inquiry. His military identity and experiences may have been the determinants of those actions described by some as “deplorable”. As a veteran of the Low Countries’ Wars, Goring’s use of violence fits the continental model, and the latitude he granted his troops in plundering England’s West Country was more a matter of expediency than terror. His “unprincipled” political actions, such as divulging details of the Army Plot to Parliament, were based on a pragmatism and realpolitik that civilian royalists rarely fathomed, blinded as they were by ideology and family connection. Little wonder that some royalist courtiers, ministers, and politicians regarded Goring with disdain. In that sense, the book might appeal to a broader audience interested in how professional soldiers make their way through the political world. Mark Charles Fissel The Augusta Arsenal Augusta, Georgia Copyright © 2008 Society for Military History

West country upper GI cancer services must be centralised

They′ve resisted it for years, and had hoped that Professor Mike Richard′s eleventh hour intervention would validate their argument; but at the end of last month, campaigners had to resign themselves to upper gastrointestinal (GI) cancer services at the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust (RCHT) being centralized to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. In effect, this moves specialist upper GI cancer surgery services out of Cornwall and into the neighbouring county of Devon.